Rivet Logic Blogs

Category: Crafter Profile

This spring and summer, the MongoDB Road Show stops in over 20 cities across the country to educate users on how MongoDB can be used to build modern business apps to improve the customer experience and accelerate time to market. Rivet Logic sponsored several of the cities and presented on the topic of building engaging customer experiences with MongoDB, discussing how a modern database can be used to better leverage existing data to derive business value. The next MongoDB Road Show is this Thursday, July 10, in San Francisco!

What Organizations Need

Organizations seeking to build engaging customer experiences on the Web often have a similar set of goals. To start, they want to increase user adoption by providing an engaging experience that brings value to the end-user. This can lead to increased customer retention, allowing organizations to create loyal customers who can then become their own brand ambassadors.

Moreover, organizations want to capitalize on their customers’ and users’ creativity and innovation by seamlessly weaving in the ability to collaborate, interact, and share into every aspect of the user experience. Businesses find the quality of this type of engagement to be particularly beneficial, due to its unpredictability. However, to enhance the value of these interactions, users need a motivator, meaning organizations need to create high quality content that’s personalized and targeted to each user’s needs.

While personas are great and have worked well to capture general types of users, in reality, users think of themselves more as individuals, with evolving interests over time. Organizations are now faced with delivering personalized experiences beyond a persona level and at an individual level.

What’s the Problem?

However, many organizations are having a hard time with this fine-grained personalization, and it’s largely due to the limiting technology they’re working with. IT teams are often faced with seemingly “impractical” features that business teams are requesting.

Organizations today are using separate systems like standalone content apps – blogs, forums, wikis, – commenting engines, traditional databases, and BI tools to enable user interaction and collect and analyze information about them. The quality of user interactions is largely driven by the quality of the user-generated content being collected and analyzed. However, since much of this valuable customer data is silo’d in disparate systems, it’s not allowing businesses to effectively leverage their existing data.

While many have attempted to find workarounds for this, there hasn’t been any real success in creating a coherent rich user interaction data set that brings value to all the delivery use cases available. For example, when a user joins the comment thread of a blog entry, they are unaware of the possibility of a forum thread that is discussing the same topic. In addition, these solutions are typically backed by traditional databases, which requires changing of the infrastructure to accommodate new use cases, posing a challenge.

The fact is, the various types of interactions that exist today are disjointed, resulting in redundancy and little chance of connecting and leveraging them. It’s critical that we make these interactions context-aware, and the only way of effectively doing so is to have a holistic view of all the user-generated content that’s being collected, while also allowing the interactions to cross application boundaries.

Pillars of a Good Solution

Successful solutions that meet these challenges must adhere to the following pillars:

Flexibility – The solution must be implemented using technology agnostic building blocks. Being a certain type of shop (.Net, PHP, Windows, etc.) constrains organizations from using the right tools for the job. Using technology agnostic building blocks as the underlying infrastructure allows organizations to innovate and improve their business without being held back by technology.

Scalability – The solution must be scalable without sacrificing performance. There are many platforms out there that claim to be scalable, but what good is that when scaling means long page load times?

Visibility – It’s also extremely important to be able to know and see the overall picture and have a holistic view of user interactions that isn’t so low-level where it prevents you from seeing what they are doing (as is the case with auditing services).

Insight – Lastly, when you have rich, contextual data available in one place, organizations need to be able to leverage that information, innovate and provide new features, capability, and value to their customers.

Case Study – AT&T Developer Community

Now let’s take a look at how a solution like this might be used in the real world. AT&T is currently undergoing an initiative to build a solution to enhance the user experience of their developer community site. The existing site’s collaboration tools are traditional in nature (i.e. blogs and forums), where user engagement is fragmented, making it difficult to find interesting content and reducing collaboration value.

To resolve this, Rivet Logic is implementing a solution that enables user-generated content to cross application boundaries and reside in one location via Crafter Social, while also allowing for better personalization by using Crafter Profile to maintain a dynamic customer profile.

Crafter Social easily adds social engagement features – user-generated comments, likes, ratings, blogs, discussion forums, and more – to a website by attaching social features to any content item or page. And Crafter Profile provides user profile and account management to help create personalized experiences.

For example, in the current site, if a user comments on a blog entry and another user participates in a forum discussion about the same topic, these interactions are not associated in any way.

With the Crafter Social solution, we were able to turn the blog entry’s comment thread into a virtual forum, thus connecting the two threads of discussion into one. This simple approach is extremely powerful, satisfying all four pillars of a good solution focused on enhancing customer engagement.

Even more, due to Crafter Social’s flexible architecture and underlying data model, it can easily be extended into other use cases, made possible by MongoDB’s document-based data models. In addition, the ability to easily embed Crafter Social into any site using any technology makes it an ideal part of any developer’s toolkit.

As illustrated in the diagram below, Crafter Social is broken into two parts. On the client side, it can be embedded on any site page regardless of what technology was used for implementation. And on the server side, Crafter Social collects various data from different sites and use cases, maintaining a holistic view of the user data. All of this helps enhance the quality of business intelligence information generated.

With this solution, AT&T is able to achieve their goals of increased user adoption and enhanced user engagement and retention. MongoDB plays a key role in the solution’s success by enabling:

Flexibility – Create new apps without revisiting infrastructure

Scalability – Ability to store large amounts of data and query without hurting performance

Visibility – Data is structured in an intuitive way allowing easy translation from raw data to something actionable

Insight – Flexible data structures and queries pave the way for creativity and innovation